On Tuesday, 20 March 2012 at 19:02:16 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
There are a few features of D that turned out to be successful,
in spite of them being seemingly unimportant or diverging from
related consecrated approaches.
What are your faves? I have a few in mind, but wouldn't want to
influence answers.
I know people have said all of these already, but I still want to
vote for
them, because they're so useful, and I routinely find myself
wishing I had
them in other languages.
1. Array slices. These allow for a lot of gains from structure
sharing and "flyweighting"; safe structure sharing is one
of the
potential big wins from GC, but in most languages with GC
it's
tricky to share structure that's in arrays, leading to a
lot of
extra space overhead for pointers and worse cache behavior
due to excessive scattering of objects around the heap.
2. Scope guard. At first I thought it was a neat little
curiosity,
but it makes it so easy to write and (more importantly)
*read*
error handling code that, whenever I use D, I find myself
thinking
about and dealing with potential failure modes that I
would gloss
over in another language.
3. Template syntax. When I first saw that it used an infix
'!' of all
things, and that the parentheses were optional, I thought
it was the
dumbest syntax ever. In practice, though, it's so much
better than
C++'s <> disaster that it's just not funny.
A bunch of other features, like type inference, I totally
expected to be extremely useful. The way auto lets you work with
objects that have
unutterable types is pretty cool, though I picked that up from
the C++11
materials I've seen. They really need the feature to make the new
lambdas
work.
Cheers,
Pillsy
